# Deep Wood Trance

- Link: https://writersworkshopindia.com/2018/02/16/deep-wood-trance/
- Published: 2018-02-16T21:34:13+00:00
- Author: shuktara

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**Author:** V. Shruti Devi[](https://writersworkshopindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Deep-Wood-Trance.jpg)
**
Pages:** 96 **Year of Publication:** 2017 **Price:** Rs 300 **ISBN: **978-93-5045-
168-7 (9789350451687)

_**About the Author**_
 Shruti Devi Vyricherla was born in Madras and educated in
New Delhi. She shuttles between her ancestral home in Kurupam, Andhra Pradesh, and
the National Capital Region. She is a lawyer and political activist, a member and
functionary of the Indian National Congress Party, which she formally joined in 
1998. As a specialist in Environmental Law, and a strong advocate for the rights
of ethnic groups, her writings appear in publications as varied as the _International
Environmental Law Yearbook_ and the _Lawyers’ Collective_, to non-fiction books 
on economics and tribal development. Beginning in the late 1980s, she has written
about culture, students’ affairs, politics and the environment in publications such
as _Swagat, The Hindustan Times, The Sunday Observer, The Hindu Folio_, and _Hard
News_ magazine. She was a part-time and voluntary co-editor of a bimonthly newsletter
on biological diversity, _NBSAP NEWS_, for a United Nations–Government of India 
project for three years in the early 2000s.

Shruti wrote extensively on the web in the 1990s. She now runs two little-publicized
blogs: one with her political views, and another with her creative writings, mainly
poetry. Apart from English, she writes Telugu, Hindi and Urdu poems and translates
from Odiya to English. She sees herself more as a poet than a writer of fiction._**
Deep Wood Trance**_ is her first work of long fiction.

_**About the Book**_

In her introduction to the book Shruti Devi writes:

“_Deep Wood Trance_ is a jugglery of an individual’s existential quest, and examinations
of ideas rooted in environmentalism, from the world of thought and science fiction
on the one hand, and of earlier writings tossed into a connecting crucible on the
other, eventually to be garnished, or iced, by the book’s nomenclature more than
a decade after its final words having been written. This, in a sentence, is the 
history of the writing of this book.

The over-arching 2005 narrative drew into the story some of my selected writings
from my teenage, college-going and young-adult years, which lay scribbled as inscriptions
in a diary, as a story that was yet to be completed. Eleven years later, I was convinced
that that this book was, indeed, complete (albeit with possible sequels that one
might plan to glean from the rest of one’s written collections), and, in 2016, I
entitled it _Deep Wood Trance_, put it into the form of a manuscript, and proceeded
to go ahead with a publishing plan.

The work of prose now in the reader’s hands assimilates a variety of styles of communication,
from blank verse, to pulp fiction, to writing for young adults, to essays, to lyrical
fragments.

…

Depending on what captures one’s imagination, as it were, one’s awareness might 
wish to wander into areas that urge us to look deeper into the worlds of scientific
experimentation; the high sciences and yoga; the system of education; spirituality;
the outdoors, and how social and physical structures impact individuals; equity 
and sustainable development; and ways forward for the planet and beyond, within 
and without. These are thrown out as fine, gossamer-like loose nets of fleeting 
thought, without presuming to appropriate levels of thought-detail from one’s fellow-
humans (or, for that matter, any other readers that might exist).”